Drones: Grounded Harder Than You Think
Monday, August 24, 2026
John Stossel's latest column -- and video, which I'm embedding below -- are worth your time and are both incredible for two very different reasons.
Let's start with the positive side of the ledger. Stossel's six minute video will be an eye-opening demonstration (or reminder) of the potential for this new and rapidly evolving technology to improve our lives.
| "Companies like Wing and Zipline bring people hot meals in under 10 minutes. I had to watch it to believe it." -- John Stossel |
Even though the technology is relatively new, and many people remain unfamiliar with it, enough people are that market feedback has led to impressive improvements. People who grouse about propeller noise, for example, may be surprised at how quiet some of the newer models are, if they notice them at all.
On to the negative side of the ledger: As amazing as this technology is, the sheer obduracy of the regulatory state is giving it a run for the money. Stossel touches on this a couple of times:
Drone delivery was supposed to be common years ago. Jeff Bezos told 60 Minutes he expected Amazon to be sending out drone deliveries by 2017.And later:
But most of us still don't have it. Why?
President Donald Trump hopes to speed that process. He signed an executive order telling the FAA to fast-track drone deliveries by allowing drones to fly beyond line of sight.If you think that's bad, this is on top of something I commented on nearly eight years ago:
But he did that more than a year ago. Government is, as usual, so slow! The FAA didn't even respond to Trump's order for months.
The President who wanted to remove two old regulations for every new one recently signed into law the FAA Reauthorization Act, which repeals an old statutory exemption from FAA rules for model aircraft, such as drones. The new law will take some time to take effect...What happened to that? is just about all I can say. Unlike today, that was one of the few times the President bothered to involve the legislature in an attempt to affect a policy. It would seem to have had absolutely no effect.
Considering this in very general terms, I'd say this may be a case of things being earlier than you think on a front for the battle for freedom. This President has no principles and never bothers to articulate why he wants to achieve anything. As a result, he has blown two opportunities to build momentum for a much-needed revision of a policy that is crippling a new sector of the economy. And that sector, as we are seeing in Ukraine and the Middle East -- and can thus easily imagine -- has national security implications.
And yes, China is already way out in front of us.
-- CAV
2 comments:
I think part of the slowness is that this is not, fundamentally, about drones. It's about property rights. Specifically: How far up does your property extend?
To give an example: Let's say I own a few acres and want my land to be drone-free. I want my kids to be able to fly kites and shoot model rockets without fear of their toys being damaged by drones, or I want to set up a radio tower (there are various reasons someone would want to do this), or I just don't want drones overhead. Does that mean that drones can't fly over my property? And if that's the case does the company need approval from every property owner and resident within the delivery corridor? Or do they have the right to fly over a certain elevation, and I just have to live with it? (The latter is our current model--the FAA de facto owns the airspace above our homes, though figuring out where that starts is tricky.) There are a bunch of follow-up questions if the answer to the last question is "Yes".
Maybe drones need to stay over roadways, but that creates other problems. Roads have utilities over them, for example. And what happens if a drone malfunctions and causes a wreck?
There are a few ways to deal with this, of course. And I think that's fundamentally what the answer is: Let the states try different things. This isn't unique; states with cattle drives had to answer this in the past, and the result was that different states implemented different solutions (fence-in vs fence-out). Mineral rights are another place we can look for information on how to handle this. So it's not that the question is unsolvable. But it is a trickier question than it first appears. I could see this as a situation where the judge in Galt's Gulch got involved, if only as a mediator. Eventually we as a society will find a solution, of course--there's no real alternative--but the solution will have some far-reaching consequences.
Property rights have a bearing, including in cases where, say, someone may not own any airspace, but is affected by excessive noise or accidents caused by drones anyway. Your crash example, would be dealt with in much the same way the law already successfully deals with vehicles that careen off a road and into someone's house.
Regarding something like "air rights," I would guess that we are about as far from that kind of solution as we are from people owning radio frequency bands as Ayn Rand recommended in "The Property Status of the Airwaves."
Even assuming that is the case, we could still work for improved laws regarding the use of drones for cargo and passenger service. Limiting them to line-of-sight operation is ludicrous, and even if, for the sake of argument, we grant that the way the FAA regulates airlines is warranted, even that could be greatly relaxed given that the flights are unmanned, at least in the case of cargo.
That said, I imagine more sensible regulation is hampered by the same kind of paranoid mindset that hinders quick acceptance of any new technology: it's unfamiliar and, there is the notion that since it might be misused, we should assume that it's more dangerous than it actually is, while also apparently forgetting that we already have laws on the books against negligence and the use of vehicles to commit crimes.
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